The U.S. space agency launched a satellite late Thursday to unlock the secrets of the Sun's lower atmosphere.

NASA's Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph -- dubbed IRIS -- was launched at 0227 GMT aboard an Orbital Sciences Pegasus XL rocket off the California coast.

Scientists say they've figured out when our human ancestors first started throwing with accuracy and fire power, as only people can: Nearly 2 million years ago.

That's what researchers conclude in a study released Wednesday by the journal Nature. There's plenty of skepticism about their conclusion. But the new paper contends that this throwing ability probably helped our ancient ancestor Homo erectus hunt, allowing him to toss weapons — probably rocks and sharpened wooden spears.

Malaysia on Thursday stepped up pressure on Indonesia to do more to stop outbreaks of smog after fires on Sumatra island sparked Southeast Asia's worst air pollution crisis for years.

Palls of smoke from slash-and-burn agricultural fires pushed haze levels to record highs in Singapore last week, shrouding the city in smog, and badly affected parts of Malaysia.

Scientists on Wednesday said they had unravelled the DNA of a horse that lived some 700,000 years ago, a record-breaking feat in the young field of palaeo-genomics.

The ancient find indicates that all horses today, as well as donkeys and zebras, shared a common ancestor that lived some four million years ago, twice as early as thought.

Renewables like solar and wind represent the fastest-growing source of energy power generation and will make up a quarter of the global power mix by 2018, the International Energy Agency said in a report Wednesday.

The IEA said that in 2016 renewable energy will overtake natural gas as a power source and will be twice that of nuclear, and second only to coal as a source of power.

The world's first space conversation experiment between a robot and humans is ready to be launched.

Developers from the Kirobo project, named after "kibo" or hope in Japanese and "robot," gathered in Tokyo Wednesday to demonstrate the humanoid robot's ability to talk.

A new species of bird with a distinctive orange-red coloured tuft of feathers on its head has been found in Cambodia's populous capital city, conservationists said on Wednesday.

The remarkable discovery of the Cambodian tailorbird, or orthotomus chaktomuk, in Phnom Penh -- and several other locations including a construction site just outside of the city of 1.5 million people -- has astounded conservationists.

China completed its longest manned space mission Wednesday as its Shenzhou-10 spacecraft and three crew members safely returned to Earth, in a major step for Beijing's goal of building a permanent space station by 2020.

The return capsule touched down at 8:07 am (0007 GMT), live state TV footage showed, kicking up a cloud of dust on the grasslands of north China's Inner Mongolia region.

Three "super Earth" planets have been found orbiting a nearby star at a distance where life in theory could exist, according to a record-breaking tally announced on Tuesday by the European Southern Observatory (ESO).

The three are part of a cluster of as many as seven planets that circle Gliese 667C, one of three stars located a relatively close 22 light years from Earth in the constellation of Scorpio, it said.

China's Shenzhou-10 spacecraft has completed a challenging mission to manually dock with a space module and its three astronauts are expected to return to earth on Wednesday, state media said Tuesday.

The astronauts have completed their mission after docking twice with the Tiangong-1 space module, where they conducted medical experiments and delivered a lecture to schoolchildren, China's official Xinhua news agency said.